Page 68 of Queen of Ruin

As she leaves the room with Cassian, something dark and selfish pulls through my chest. I don’t want her to remember. I don’t want her to unlock that other part of her because then the woman I know, the one I’ve fallen in love with, might cease to exist.

How do I compare in a world like this?

“You look like you could use a drink.” Bradley’s shadow falls over me. “Beer?”

Rejecting him means I’ll have to return to Valentina’s room and wait for the dreaded news that she’s remembered everything. Maybe the sting of alcohol can chase away these unwanted thoughts, so I nod and stand.

“Sure.”

Bradley leads the way out of the room, and I follow him down the long corridor, gaining one last glimpse of Valentina’s gorgeous hair before she vanishes around a corner.

“Preference?” Bradley’s voice drifts through the door, so I hurry into yet another lounge set up with soft couches, a couple of tables littered with card games, and a pool table in the far corner.

“I’m not picky,” I say as I enter and spot Ruslan near the pool table.

“How did she take it?” Ruslan asks, watching Bradley cross the room and hand me my beer.

“Better than expected,” Bradley replies. “We’ve all had knocks to the head before, but this is something else.”

“You know what will happen if she can’t remember.” Ruslan picks up his own beer from where it rests on the side of the pool table.

“We’re not there yet,” Bradley replies.

“What will happen?” I ask, even though it feels like I’m stepping into a conversation I shouldn’t be a part of.

“A vote,” Ruslan replies. “If she can’t remember, she can’t fulfill her duties. She’ll be the first Queen forced to retire and with the shortest reign.”

“Just like that?” For some reason, an itchy heat blooms across my chest. “You’d just abandon her?”

Ruslan’s eyes narrow. “No, we wouldn’t abandon her. But the world doesn’t stop for her. We still have a duty to carry out, and she can’t do that if she can’t remember all the things that make her good at this. It’s not something we’d like to do at all, but the longer this goes on, the more real the possibility becomes.”

“That sounds like abandoning her,” I remark hotly. Ideally, if she leaves here, then there’s a chance the woman I love can come back home with me, but even as I embrace that idea, it doesn’t feel right.

She deserves to know herself.

Regardless of where I stand.

“It sounds harsh,” Bradley agrees as he leans against the pool table and uncaps his beer. “But Valentina herself would be the first one to tell us not to delay. She wouldn’t want her condition to hamper anything about what we do here. She’d be the first to kick one of us out too, but it’s not because we don’t care and it wouldn’t be because she doesn’t care. It’s because she knows how fragile this world is. The work we do? It could vanish like that.” He snaps his fingers, then takes a drink. “All it takes is one family with enough money and enough power to go against us, the government, and every other crime family enjoying the fruits of this agreement. Then war breaks out again.”

“If it’s really that fragile, what’s the point?” I remove the cap from my beer and savor the malty taste as it floods over my tongue. “Why bother?”

“Because we don’t want to die?” Ruslan snorts, then he sighs. “And it’s not about us. You’re thinking about this all wrong. What we do isn’t to protect scumbags. I mean… it is and it isn’t. This isn’t about stopping one rich cunt from tearing into another rich cunt, or whose drugs are higher quality or whatever. It’s about the people caught in the middle.”

“Exactly,” Bradley agrees. “It’s about… the people whose entire families get threatened because they were in the wrong place and the wrong time and trip into some twisted grasp of power between families, or the ones who are dragged into hell by their family and are just ordinary criminals but risk execution because one bastard was stupid enough to steal from the Mafia. It’s about the people who can’t afford medication and education because of the lives they lead, serving one of these families. The neighborhoods that are kept safe, the rapists and pedophiles we hunt down and put away, the real scum of the earth.”

“What about the others?” I ask, eyes narrowed. “The teenagers who get addicted to drugs, who get pimped out by assholes older than them, who cause accidents because they’re too high to care?”

“Balance,” Ruslan replies. “The drugs will exist whether we are here or not. We just make sure that the flow is managed and no one’s cutting in something dangerous. For every downside, there’s an upside, and that’s where the balance is.”

“No one here is taking the moral high ground,” Bradley says, draining his beer. “But for every person lost, a person is saved. Without us, nothing good happens.”

“So the ones lost are a necessary evil?” I snap.

“Exactly.” Ruslan smiles. “Kind of like the two men you killed to keep you and Valentina safe. A necessary evil.”

My mouth parts and a protest rises, but I can’t argue back on that. He’s right. I killed those men because, in that moment, what was important to me was survival. This city, this world, faces the same choice every single moment of every day, just on a much grander scale.

“And Valentina?” Bradley sighs. “She knows all of this. Or she knew it. Which is why she would be the first to kick herself out if she was hindering that balance.”